


Gneiss To Meet You

by unintelligiblescreaming



Series: The World Saves Itself [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: ...probably, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, For Want of a Nail, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Mentors, Not Shippy, Omashu (Avatar), POV Toph Beifong, Toph Beifong-centric, Toph Being Awesome, if you're generous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:03:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26036842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unintelligiblescreaming/pseuds/unintelligiblescreaming
Summary: On a clear, sunny day, the greatest earthbender in the world decides to run away from home. She’s bored. She’ll go to Omashu, she decides, and meet King Bumi. People say he grows special crystals that can swallow a person whole over the course of a few hours. Maybe she can bully him into showing her how it’s done.--(AU where Aang is never discovered in the iceberg and everyone else has to stop the war without him. Can be read independently of its series.)
Relationships: Toph Beifong & Bumi
Series: The World Saves Itself [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1865455
Comments: 10
Kudos: 57





	Gneiss To Meet You

On a clear, sunny day, the greatest earthbender in the world decides to run away from home. She’s bored. She’ll go to Omashu, she decides, and meet King Bumi. People say he grows special crystals that can swallow a person whole over the course of a few hours. Maybe she can bully him into showing her how it’s done. 

It’ll take a long time to get there. That’s okay. She’ll take her time.

#

Several weeks later, as Toph is walking the streets of Omashu, she realizes two things. Number one: this place is _big._ She thought she grew up in a city, but she’s never been anywhere like this. There’s so much movement sprawling in every direction that she can’t possibly keep track of all of it. Number two: she’s a tiny runaway who can’t leverage her family name without risking someone realizing that she has a price on her head, so she has no idea how she’s going to get an audience with King Bumi, let alone convince him to teach her cool tricks. On the other hand, rumor has it he’s crazy, so maybe he’s crazy enough to show her the crystals thing for no reason?

...yeah, she might need to make a different plan. Once she’s run through a few quick scams and used the money to pay for a nice meal from a delicious-smelling roadside cart, she ambles up toward the heart of the city, where she assumes the palace is located.

She soon regrets every one of her life choices.

 _The problem,_ she reflects five hours later, _is that I just got too excited._ After spending several hours scouting around the palace, and then a fun half hour sneaking into the king’s vast training arena (he has very unobservant servants, apparently), she was so excited to have found a bunch of cool stuff left lying unattended that she didn’t pause to think. 

In retrospect, it was a bad idea to put on the cool ring with the weird stone set into it.

It was also probably a bad idea to react to the ring sprouting rapidly-growing crystals with ecstatic delight. She probably should’ve been alarmed. The crystals had a weird, echoey internal structure she’d never encountered before. She could’ve shattered it with bending at that point, but she wanted to see what would happen and whether the rate of growth would speed up or slow down, so she left it alone. She was delighted when it swallowed up her arm and spread to her torso. She only bothered to get it off herself when it threatened to immobilize her other arm; she didn’t want her bending to be compromised.

 _The good news,_ she reflects, _is that my bending did work on the crystals. The bad news…_

…is that the crystals didn’t stop growing once she shattered them and tossed them away from her. It’s been two hours and the growth rate has only increased. Breaking it into pieces might have actually accelerated the crystal generation rate. Each small shard of is turning into its own Toph-sized knot of rock. She found the ring in a storage room off the side of the palace’s gigantic training arena and now the storage room is nearly entirely full of swiftly-growing crystal. Some of the spikier segments are threatening to poke through the walls. She can sense the strength of the material; if no one does anything about this, it has the potential to expand so much that it destroys the whole damn palace.

Turns out she doesn’t like the mad king of Omashu’s famously murderous minerals after all. She backs away slowly. She could swear the damn rock is _reaching out_ for her. 

She’s horrified by how sharp and strange the ring-crystal feels to her feet, a close cousin to the slippery, gleaming, unyielding feeling that metal has in her earth-sense. Her attention is focused on it completely. That’s why she doesn’t notice the guard blocking the doorway until she runs right into him.

Attempting to explain herself to authority figures has never gone well for Toph once in her entire life, so when the guards drag her through the palace halls, apparently intending to arrest her for something, she tries to escape. She stomps and tosses the guard who grabbed her down the hall and takes off running, blocking her pursuers with a wall of earth behind her. 

Unfortunately, she’s so rattled by seeing the crystals that she forgets to check what she’s running towards. She barrels right into two whole guard patrols, who shout a lot and clearly have no clue what’s going on but figure they might as well grab the tiny earthbender who’s trying to escape for some reason. 

That time, they put her hands in metal cuffs. From their gruff conversation, they’ve decided she’s trouble enough to take her up to the King. She waits until they relax a little bit, then smashes the cuffs with a spike of earth and darts away. Doorways and stairs are for losers—real earthbenders make their own paths. She busts down the wall and runs through, sealing it behind her. 

At least one of the guards is a bender. He tears open the wall and follows. She quickly bends herself another doorway in the next wall and keeps running.

It’s enormously satisfying, or at least it might be if she wasn’t being chased. It’s tremendously rude to bend indoors. She imagines the scandalized gasp her mother would give if she saw Toph doing this and grins.

Four hallways down, she runs out of walls.

She finds herself standing in a gigantic room, almost as big as the training arena she snuck into earlier. The gigantic room happens to include dozens of people, several guards, and… one gigantic throne. There’s an instant where everyone gasps and freezes in unison—everyone except the guy sitting on the throne. 

“Hello there!” he says a crackling, delighted voice. “Who might you be?”

Wow, this _really_ isn’t how she pictured meeting the King of Omashu. The guards lining the walls get over their shock and settle into bending stances. Toph instinctively does the same. A guard with heavier armor than the rest—probably a captain or something—stomps a disc of earth up into the air. Toph is about to respond in kind, but then the King of Omashu waves his hand impatiently. “Now, now, don’t be rude to our guest, even if she has arrived rather unexpectedly! I’m sure she has a perfectly good explanation.”

Toph isn’t sure what kind of good explanation His Majesty expects from a stranger who entered by breaking down a wall, but she nods frantically anyways. “Yeah, definitely,” she says. She has tons of practice coming up with excuses to give her parents. She can probably figure something out in the ten seconds she has before she has to speak.

The king sits back. “Well, go on.”

“Um, well, you see—”

A segment of the wall that Toph came through shakes and crumbles. The guards who had been trying and failing to arrest her have caught up. One of them barks, “That’s the fugitive! Get her!”

“Ooh, a fugitive. Exciting,” says the king. He turns to the guard who’s rushing toward Toph and asks sharply, “What are you doing?”

“Uh,” says the guard. “Arresting the miscreant?”

“I have a better idea. How about you fetch some snacks?”

The guard sputters for a moment, then trudges toward the hole in the wall. As she leaves, the king calls, “And close that hole back up while you’re at it!”

“You know,” says Toph slowly. “I’m not really a fugitive or a miscreant. It’s a bit of a misunderstanding. I just got… lost.”

“Lost?” asks the king.

“Yeah. Lost.” She gets the sense that he is unimpressed. Hm. The ‘I got lost’ excuse worked a lot better on her parents. She improvises, “I’m blind and I was trying to find the entrance to the palace, and I did, but it turns out it was the servant’s entrance. I asked for directions, but I got the number of left turns and right turns mixed up and ended up in your… basement? I’m pretty sure it’s a basement? And then some guards found me and said I wasn’t supposed to be there. I asked them for directions to the throne room, and they were taking me there, but I… went on ahead? Yeah. I went on ahead. But they got annoyed because I was going faster than them. And because I was going through walls.”

“And do you have some kind of grudge against walls?”

“…yes,” says Toph.

“Why is that?”

“They get in my way?”

The king starts laughing uncontrollably. His laugh is an unrefined giggle-snort that would give Toph’s mother a heart attack. “Fair enough!” he says through his laughter.

Toph thinks about the multiplying crystals downstairs. Bringing it up is a bad idea, but it might be a worse idea to avoid the subject until the foundations start to crumble and she gets arrested for the world’s dumbest accidental royal assassination attempt. “By the way,” she says. “I, um, noticed something? In the basement? That you might want to check out?”

“Which is?”

“Your, ah, special crystals. Are expanding. Rapidly.”

“Is that _so._ And how did that happen, hmm?”

“No idea,” she says brightly.

“Really? You have _no_ idea? It has nothing to do with you, does it?”

“Yes. That’s exactly it. Nothing to do with me.”

The king drums his fingers on the arm of his throne. “That’s fascinating. You know, the thing about those crystals is that their composition is rather unusual. Bending them often has unexpected results.”

“Wow!” says Toph. “What an interesting fact that definitely isn’t relevant to me in any way!”

“Tell me, what’s your name?”

“Well, people call me the Blind Bandit.”

“Interesting. People call me ‘your majesty,’ but you can call me Bumi. How about we make a deal, Blind Bandit. You and I will take a trip downstairs, you’ll tell me exactly what you did so I can figure out how to fix it, and then I’ll show you how to bend my Omashu crystals. And in exchange, you can tell me how you learned to sense people’s movements without your eyes—that’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it?”

Toph is caught off guard. She’s never met anyone who’s picked up on it so fast. 

Her silence must be telling, because the king says, “I _thought_ so. Does that sound fair?”

Cautiously, she nods. “Sure,” she says. “Why not.”

**Author's Note:**

> bumi just had people-swallowing magic crystals and no one mentioned this ever again. i think about this sometimes


End file.
